consciousness

What if you were to change your previous cause and effect relationships to experience what happens next in the direction of trust? Interested in exploring this trust wild card?

This level of trust requires a merging of all your need to prove rightness about reality – to consider instead embracing an alternative reality that supports humility, openness, and authenticity. There’s nothing to lose because you never had anything to gain from being right. All you really have is your perceptions to fear – ghosts.

What about Ego?

I acknowledge I have an ego. That’s the aspect of mind that tells me what to do and how to do it. Behind every ego order, there’s an army of defenses armed and ready to give me a sense of authority. The seat of rightness can get pretty demanding when I abdicate my true self-authority.

Many of my life’s intentions have been left to ego, whose job it is to protect me from harm. So far, I think it’s done a pretty good job – at the expense of losing connection with others, not to mention losing touch with my genuine Self.

Considering the infrequency of my Self-awareness that’s capable of challenging ego, I must admit it may well be that I’ve simply believed the propaganda.

To explore beyond ego, one would have to release defenses of any kind. When you don’t have to be right, you won’t set yourself up to be wrong either.

Playing the Trust Wild Card

When you find that fear has left you, your choices increase exponentially and your opportunities for understanding match those choices.

Playing the trust wild card simply comes down to acceptance of Self as authority over ego, which is used to being in charge, a position it’s not keen to relinquish. Self-awareness may take Self-trust in the face of ego-imagined fears. With practice and patience, I can tame the wild beast.

And what I can do about it!

“When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful…” (Eric Thomas – AKA ET The Hip Hop Preacher)

This new age saying is nothing new. It expresses the concept that we must fight to accomplish anything of value. That value determines the worth of people, things, thoughts, and behaviors. That success for one means defeat for another. Success and failure are measured in terms of value. To be of value, one must succeed. These concepts live within the First-Second Degree of Illuminationbubble awareness.

I have values. I value my own opinion and those of certain others who agree with me. Certain activities carry value for me. I use value to assist me in judging, comparing, balancing, and separating. I even use value to evaluate values. Everything in my world has a value to me – usually experienced in terms of importance.

The value of a perception of threat must rise to a certain level of importance to me before I invest in defense. That threshold allows me to prioritize my thoughts and behaviors, saving precious life force energy. After all, defense is a feed, a draw on life force energy. So, the fewer times I have to call upon defense, the more energy I have available for useful (to me) work.

While appearing to provide value, defense diminishes the resources required to satisfy the need for which it was invoked. Therefore, I tend to have few needs compared to wants. And needs tend to elicit far more value than wants. Unless, that is, I transform a lower-value want into a higher-value need.

When want-fulfillment becomes more important than the lives and properties of those involved, a want transforms into a need and a feed is born! That feed includes the want-turned-need and its satisfaction through forced attainment and contrived justification. A value-elevated want can justify the feed that justifies a need and the actions taken to satisfy it.

Turning a Want into a Need Feed

I’ve expressed personal worth in terms of comparative value – “You’re a better man than I am.” I may define strength of will as a comparable value as well – “You’re so much stronger than I am.” When these values climb to need levels, I hear things like, “You’re the best man for the job!” and, “You’re the strongest person I know!” These are setups for need feeds!

By assigning value, I can morph a non-physical want into a physical quest for survival. The higher the value I assign to a want, the more specific the object of my desire must be. That “must be” is how I turn a want into a need.

In elevating a want into a need, I simplify my choices – by narrowing acceptable outcomes. Needs tend to narrow choices to one – simple. Wants tend to allow more options. For example, “I want a drink” allows many forms of satisfaction, “Yeah, a coke will do.” “I need a drink” means only whiskey will do. Simple non-choice default, the implication of which is, “I can’t live without it” – thus, the need feed!

Although elevating a want to need status can energize my mind and heart into working together to provide the value I seek in satisfaction, my mind and heart will feel the result of a need feed.

When turning a want into a need, I might ask myself how important are the specifics of each answer:

What do I want? (the objective)
How do I get it? (the strategy)
Why do I need it? (the want-need switch)
Who am I that needs this? (my self-image in this case)

How might I recover the energy of a want-turned-need?

I like to listen for the words, “need”, “must”, “can’t”, “have to”, “only”, and “should” to help me identify my need feeds. When I hear one, I think to myself, “What do I actually need in this situation?” and notice how this changes the energy of my situation.

Within my First-Second Degree of Illumination bubble consciousness, I experience the concepts of “Source” and “Oneness” in terms of separation and competition. This sense of prompts me to view life in terms of ME vs Not ME.

From this perspective, I am not the Source or One. I seek, pray, or connect in some way to Source or Oneness – because I’m conscious it is NOT ME. Even when I think Source is IN me, “it” appears as a separate concept competing with others.

An Illusion of Separation

I manage this “trick” of conscious separation by means of aspects I defend. Each aspect seems separate from others because each DOES something different from its siblings. Yet, they are actually all functions of ONE consciousness – ONE Source ME.

Separation Within Oneness

ONE (Source) provides an illusion of separation by flowing consciousness through functions of:

Will that provides power for…

Intent that provides beliefs and direction for…

The Interpreter that translates belief thoughts into…

Experience in the form of emotion, sensual awareness, judgments, and etc.

This process returns accounting back through the various functions to Source:

Will accounts to Source by returning an appreciation for separation.

Intent accounts to Will by returning a sense of purpose…

The Interpreter accounts to Intent by returning value and meaning for beliefs and direction…

Experience accounts to The Interpreter by providing validation for interpreted belief thoughts…

Within the First-Second Degree of Illumination bubble, I have an interpreter that defines my reality based on my intentions. Intention may be the aspect of mind that divides right from wrong – duality. My interpreter may be that aspect of mind that seeks to validate my intention. Providing meaning – by comparison – and making sense of – by defending – my resulting experience.

How can ONE experience division without fragmenting Humpty Dumpty-style? What if, by interpreting itself in terms of separation, ONE could experience fragmentation without being fragmented? No pieces to put back together again – and no need for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

Perhaps my inner interpreter – that applies meaning to intention – provides me with this appearance of separateness without separating me from all that is – ONE.

An illusion, I grant you – though a useful one that I experience as sensual feedback, attention, awareness, and purpose. Much more than this, I suspect it may also involve imagination and intention.

Thus, my interpreter presents my ONE consciousness with meaning that appears as individuated consciousness, from which sense of separation causes conflict, the desired effect.

In this duality, an interpreter offers me a means to choose what, how, and why I experience, deepening my belief in who I am through my intention.

This conflict may not be within my interpreter, rather, with my intention.

Does my interpreter define everything based on my intention?

In the order of my creation – What, How, Why, and Who – it is the Why of my creation that tends to hold the intention of judgment, the basis for interpretation of Who I am.

For example:
What = a person. How = feedback about that person from my senses. Why = my intention to judge them to validate… Who = I believe I am based on my intentions.

Creation may flow according to cause and effect: Cause is in the intention, Process is in the interpretation, and Effect is in the experience. Through continual feedback, the flow becomes self-sustaining.

When I want to understand my interpretations, I must question my intentions, the source of those interpretations. By following my creation backwards from effect to cause – Why, How, and What, I inevitably come to my intention.

Example questions to back-check my defenses of past truth from effect to cause:

Could “but” indicate a 3rd Degree of Illumination choice point? Let’s investigate the competition involved in “but” – that little three-letter joiner word I use to express the conflict between two competing concepts.

“I want to” but “I don’t want to” is the same as
“I want to” vs “I don’t want to” which is the same as
“This” vs “That” in terms of value – a choice point between values

Value vs Value – a split in my beliefs – an opening.

Who am I “butting”? Who am I challenging with a “but”? Who am I – really?